


Sadness, or How To Be a Dramatic Bitch by Eliot Waugh

by portraitofemmy



Series: the one with the dog [5]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Friendship, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Season/Series 4, Quentin Coldwater Lives, canon typical trauma, like really light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 23:58:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19452175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portraitofemmy/pseuds/portraitofemmy
Summary: Sad is Quentin’s bag, not his. Fear is supposed to be Eliot’s thing. Fear comes easily to him, fear of commitment, fear of failure, fear of expectation. But that’s fine. He knows how to deal with that, or at least how to avoid it aggressively enough that he doesn’t have to deal with it. Sadness is Quentin’s thing, anger is Margo’s, fear is Eliot’s.Except it turns out human beings are fucking emotionally complex creatures. Go fucking figure.





	Sadness, or How To Be a Dramatic Bitch by Eliot Waugh

**Author's Note:**

> I was sad so I projected about it for like 3k. As with all fics in this 'verse, being caught up on the others is not necessary to reading this one.
> 
> All my love and eternal gratitude to [saltandpepperbox](https://saltandpepperbox.tumblr.com/), who was also sad, but agreed to beta this anyway.

Eliot doesn’t get sad.

Sad is Quentin’s bag, not his. Fear is supposed to be Eliot’s thing. Fear comes easily to him, fear of commitment, fear of failure, fear of expectation. But that’s fine. He knows how to deal with that, or at least how to avoid it aggressively enough that he doesn’t have to deal with it. Sadness is Quentin’s thing, anger is Margo’s, fear is Eliot’s.

Except it turns out human beings are fucking emotionally complex creatures. Go fucking figure.

Eliot also mostly doesn’t smoke these days. It’s on the list of things he’s been trying to give up since the baby monster played in his body, under cocaine and a couple places above alcohol. He can justify stealing Josh’s vape, though, because technically it’s not _smoking_ , and he’s not entirely sure it’s nicotine either. It’s probably not. The world feels a little softer than it usually would with nicotine. Nothing’s turning purple or spinning, though, and Josh isn’t exactly here to ask, so Eliot just decides _weed_ and rolls with it.

Josh isn’t here, because he’s with Margo, who’s in Fillory. Of course. If Margo were here, he wouldn’t be out on the veranda contemplating sadness, because she would have done something to stop him being sad. ‘Something’ being a roll of the dice between ‘made out with him’ and ‘yelled at him’ and ‘made him watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.’ 

It was hard to be sad when there was a trans worm alien and a man made of goo having complicated plot at you, and Margo’s running commentary on top of it all. 

But Margo’s in Fillory, and Q’s actually having a good spell right now, not only not numb but generally in a good mood. Inquisitive and curious, he’s in full research mode, probably accidentally completing a masters thesis in god-human differential anatomy. As a general rule, Eliot’s never minded having negative feelings at other people. He prescribed to the ‘if I’m suffering so should you’ school of being a dramatic fucking bitch. That’s never exactly applied to Quentin, though. 

Fuck, Eliot remembers vaguely, in the impressionistic way he remembers his life on the mosaic, burying his own grief for one of the best friends of his _whole life_ when Arielle died. Because Quentin had the right to grieve more, and was incapable of squishing it down. Eliot wasn’t, so he did. It took him almost a year to grieve her, until he was sure there was no chance of Teddy being without a parent who had their shit together. 

So Eliot’s vaping out on the porch of his NYC apartment, like the Millennial cliche he is, and wallowing. He’s wallowing, okay, he knows it. It’s even worse, because there’s no reason to be sad. No reason to feel like his chest has been cracked open and everything good inside it has bled out, until all that’s left is hollow emptiness and the ache of hurt. He has no right, when he woke up this morning with Quentin’s head on his bicep, mashed into his armpit like anyone would choose to sleep like that, like he squished unconsciously closer in the night until there was no closer to squish. 

Except he’d woken up groggy and for half a second he’d forgotten where he was, and when he was, and – almost – _who_ he was. For a second there, he’d felt a smaller masculine body sleeping against him and thought _Mike_. And then he’d had to remember... all of it. 

_All of it._

Which was stupid, because in the scale of important people in the scope of his life, Quentin dramatically outweighed literally every single person besides Margo. Julia and Fen perhaps came _close_ now at this point, in their own unique ways. Where Julia still felt like _sister_ , and Fen was an unbreakable bond he wasn’t sure he even wanted to break anymore. Mike had been a blip, really, a 2 month hiatus in a land where good things happened to boys like Eliot and there was no consequences for it.

He’d tried to allow himself to grieve the idea of who Mike was to him, even if he couldn’t grieve the person, who’d never really existed.

He’s not sure he’s emotionally advanced enough for that.

A soft knock on the patio door startles him, and he looks to see Julia poking her head out. 

“You’ve been out here for long enough to start to frizz in the humidity so I figured I should check on you,” she says, lips quirking a little in a small smile, and he’s reminded again forcefully that growing up with Q shaped her as much as she shaped him. 

“I think I’m a little high?” He says, because he’s not sure what else to say. 

“If you’re too high to come back inside, I don’t think that’s a little,” she says, amused, and opens the door more fully. It’s enough to let Dessy out onto the balcony, and she bounds out full of puppy excitement, sniff, sniff, sniffing her way over to Eliot. Naturally, since he is the most readily available source of misery in the apartment, she decides it’s her god-given duty to climb onto him. This doesn’t work exceptionally well, because he’s human and she is a fairly small puppy, but he helps her out.

“I’m not too high to move,” he assures Julia, who’s come out to fold down next to him, while he scratches the puppy, lets her gnaw lightly on his fingers. Then, because apparently he is high enough that his filter is gone, says “do you ever think about how much fucking grieving we’ve had to do.”

“Oh, so it’s _that_ kind of high,” she says, lightly, then motions for the vape. “Give, I think I need some help getting to the place for this conversation.”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t– I was just saying,” he protests, but hands the vape over to her anyway. 

She inhales and blows the vapor out _through_ her nose, which is actually weirdly hot. Eliot kind of gets why so many people who are into women are into her, in that moment. “Q and I talked about that, once, during the– after his dad died.”

‘During the time with the monster’ Eliot fills in himself and scratches his fingers softly over the puppy so he can have something to focus on under his hands. “He’s lost more than me,” Eliot says softly, the _‘he almost lost me’_ going implied.

“I don’t think it’s really a contest,” Julia says, thoughtfully. “I’m not going to stand here and say he had it worse than me because he lost a parent and all I lost was magic. Because I know that it’s okay to be angry about that loss, to feel like something was taken from me.”

“I _didn’t_ lose anything, though,” Eliot protests, even though his chest is aching.

“You lost your crown,” Julia points out, and yeah, that still hurts. 

_You’re a good king, but it’s time to become a great one_ , the fucking Great Cock had told him, at the start of the quest. But he’d never really been a good king, and the attempt to become a great one had lost him the whole farm. But– “Margo’s better at it than I was,” he points out, giving Julia a slightly sardonic look, and she rolls her eyes.

“Margo also had a choice, you didn’t. You didn’t get a choice to leave Fillory, either.”

“I chose to stay,” he says, and it’s surprisingly emphatic. Julia tilts her head at him, taking another drag on the vape. “I could have gone back with her. She wanted me to. She practically drags me back by my balls every time she comes through. I chose to stay here with Q.”

Julia’s quiet for long enough that Eliot has to look away, looking back down at the puppy. Dessy’s rolled over onto her back in his lap, and he scratches her belly automatically. “Do you regret that?”

“No,” Eliot says immediately, earnestly. “There isn’t a single day that I’m not grateful for the second chance. But, you know... sometimes I wake up and for a hot second I think he’s my ex-boyfriend that I literally murdered in cold blood, and then the day gets a little funny.”

He hadn’t meant to say it, and the vibe between them goes real weird for a minute while Julia digests this. Then she says, gently, “You should talk to Q about it.”

“That is literally the _last_ thing I should do,” he responds immediately, because the idea feels so wrong that it scrapes against his skin.

“Well, of the people in our immediate social circle, the ones who understand ‘I was directly responsible for the death of a romantic partner’ are Quentin and Kady, and I can’t imagine you want to talk to her about it.”

“You realize that three friends randomly having that particular experience in common is _horrifying_ , right?” Eliot points out, because what the _fuck are their lives_ , Jesus.

“Welcome to being a Magician, baby,” Julia say dryly, and hands back the vape.

Unfortunately, Julia is usually right about these sorts of things. She somehow ended up being the _emotionally mature_ friend, which he’s going to chalk up to the god-thing. Divinity required high wisdom. It didn’t change the fact that Eliot hated dumping his shit on Quentin, not when Quentin had enough of his own shit to slog through. A shit-free day should be celebrated. Shit free weeks were a _gift._

Q’s mostly camped out on the couch, spread with 3 different books and a laptop and the adorable little crease on his forehead that says ‘thinky-thoughts are happening now.’ He glances up at them when they step back in from the balcony, but it’s the cursory kind of glance that you give to movement in your periphery. Clearly, Eliot and Julia existing in space around him is a regular enough occurrence that it doesn’t register in his study-brain. 

Julia gives Eliot a pointed look and then promptly takes herself the fuck elsewhere. He’d be annoyed, except he probably needs to be bullied and Margo’s not here to do it. Hovering awkwardly is really not his style, though, so he opts for throwing himself dramatically onto the couch on top of Quentin’s books.

“The _fuck?_ ” Quentin hisses, shoving at Eliot until he can work the books out from under him. “Some of these are _old,_ you asshole. I’m going to feed you to the Library if they come looking for damages.”

“They already hate me,” Eliot says dismissively, then, because band-aids, ripping, all that: “Remember how I got banned because I set fire to the book of my ex-boyfriend who was actually the Beast and who, oh yeah, I literally murdered in front of me.”

There’s a beat or two of absolute silence, and then the careful click of Quentin’s computer shutting. “I do remember that.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, quietly, because he’s not sure what else to say. He’s not sure why he’s sad, or what talking to Q about it is going to accomplish.

That is, until Q starts nudging at him, poking him into rearrange his sprawl on the couch until he’s half-curled around Quentin’s body, can bury his nose in against Q’s neck. Quentin’s always been perfectly hug-sized, any way they want to try to wrap together always just _works._ But maybe that’s just love, just the willingness to ignore sharp edges. Quentin smells like laundry soap and day-old aftershave, and just enough of the _Quentin_ smell that means he should probably shower tonight but isn’t in the middle of an ‘it’s shower or eat and the choice is obvious’ low energy phase. He smells nothing like Mike had. He feels nothing like Mike had.

“You know, he was the first boyfriend I’d had in years,” Eliot says, and it hurts to even say it, why is he _talking about it_ , why is he giving this pain to Q. “I had pretty much given up on the concept. I’m a terrible boyfriend.”

Quentin’s little snort should sting, but it doesn’t. “You’re pretty bad at the early stages,” he agrees, and his voice is so warm Eliot wants to sink into it. “That’s mostly because you’re scared of the idea of being happy, though.”

_See, fear I’m good at_ , Eliot thinks, pushing his face into Quentin’s neck more. “Something about him just felt– I don’t know. I don’t _know,_ Q, why did I let myself... of all the boys I fucked casually for months, why did the one who happened to be a fucking _murder hobo_ have to be the one that actually made feelings happen.”

“I don’t know, baby,” Quentin says gently, and Eliot can feel his hands working up under Eliot’s vest to rub his back. “Maybe he just made you feel wanted. I can’t imagine the people who were willing to fuck casually for months were trying very hard to get something else from you.”

“That’s true,” Eliot admits. Fuck, but Quentin’s so perfect to hug, so exactly right for him. The shape of the grief for Mike would be nothing, _nothing_ compared to– But he shuts that line of thought down quickly, because Q’s taking his meds and he’s doing better and he’s so very, very here right now. “Sometimes I can still see him dying. Do you ever– with Alice, I mean–”

“Yeah,” Quentin says softly. “It’s usually weird things, though, like... how her hair looked on the forest floor or– the way all I could smell was burned fabric and your cologne. Because you were holding me back.”

“He wasn’t even the first person I killed,” Eliot says dully, and isn’t that just a fucking wonderful thought. “Just the first one I meant to. And somehow I’m fucked up by it? Like... three years later after– unimaginable horror, I don’t know why this is–”

He cuts himself off, because tears are welling hotly in his eyes, and Eliot Waugh does not cry. Except it’s Q, who loved him for fifty years, and buried him, and stayed by his side after Eliot broke his heart, who _babysat his body_ for nine months and still stuck around after. It’s not like Quentin’s exactly going to judge him. 

“I miss my Bambi,” He mutters, and it’s not the point, that’s not the point, that’s not why he’s sad except it’s not _not_ why he’s sad either. 

“Baby,” Quentin says gently, nosing down until they’re kiss-height, until he can take the sadness right out of Eliot’s lips with soft, gentle kisses. “Do you want to go visit her? We can try the portals again or–”

“No,” Eliot cuts off, clutching on to Quentin, because the best they’ve been able to manage was reconnecting the clock, and that still left _getting back_ kind of reliant on Penny. “That’s not what I meant. I just usually throw my existential angst at her, you know?”

“Yeah,” Quentin agrees, laughing a little. “Actually, I think I do know.” 

He does, he does know. It’s something they’ve always understood about each other, the importance of the girls they call best friends but are more an extension of themselves. 

“I think Julia was just gonna get high with me, which is not a very Margo approach,” he says thoughtfully.

“Well,” Quentin says, gentle, almost laughing. “I don’t usually need to be bullied into talking about my feelings. Kind of the opposite, really.”

“You’re cute when you’re emotive,” Eliot says, because Quentin’s cute most times. It’s just like, his state of being.

“You’re biased,” Quentin counters, and then asks curiously “What would Margo do to help you feel better?”

“Probably make me watch Star Trek and make out with me,” Eliot sighs, and there’s a tense second where he can feel Quentin digesting the words. 

“You realize you just described two of my favorite activities, right?” Quentin says, tightly, and Eliot starts laughing, can’t help himself. “No, I’m serious, if that’s what it takes to make you feel better, I will _fall on that sword._ I will _give up my day_ to that plan, oh my god. What series of Star Trek? Are you going to kill me if I talk over it?”

“Please, please talk over it,” Eliot says emphatically, still laughing, because Quentin is perfect, absolutely _perfect_ for him. 

“This is the _best day_ ,” Q says, delighted, and Eliot has to kiss him. 

What sadness can hold a candle to this?

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found as portraitofemmy on most places, but check out [twitter](https://twitter.com/portraitofemmy) and [tumblr](https://portraitofemmy.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


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